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Tatra Epiphany

[A note to the reader: I wrote this essay many years ago about the intersection between trombone playing and the reality of body perception. I will follow up with a more recent take. I have tried to keep the editing to a minimum; these were my thoughts at the time. Enjoy!]

You can never predict when you might reach your next level of perception. Each summer, my wife and I stay in Roháčeinthe “Western Tatra” mountains of Slovakia. The mountain forests are flush with raspberries, blueberries, and mushrooms. Part of the vacation ritual is for my in-laws to collect mushrooms and dry them for use later in the year, especially for a soup made around Christmas time. The mushrooms smell woody, earthen. I practiced among tables of sliced mushrooms drying on sections of newspapers. It was among the mushrooms where I had an epiphany that took my playing to a higher plateau.

The journey of improvement on the trombone seems to be made of steps and plateaus. There are times when improvement can be felt. The higher plateau of ability is exhilarating, at first. Then there is the feeling of “I’m awful!” and the work towards the next step up occurs.Then there is the next plateau to conquer. I find myself asking, “Is this it?” when I reach a plateau. In my journey, as if I am climbing Mt. Everest, I am always making it to what feel like a higher plateau.

My teacher, David Taylor, counsels me to concentrate on what my tongue is doing. This is easier said than done. I realized that I was thinking of my embouchure as flat in profile like all the drawings of the lateral cut-away mouth used to show tongue placement. The type is well know – a tilted coat-of-arms with two white, long-tailed tadpoles that represent the teeth and gums surrounding an albino leech that is the tongue. This pale heraldry does not come close to the actual sensation of the mouthpiece touching the face and the roof of the mouth being tapped by the tip of the tongue. A superior diagram would imply a three-dimensional mouth and mouthpiece but would still fall flat.

In the mountains, I became aware of the difference between the way I was thinking about my embouchure and the reality of the fullness of experience. It was as though a flat drawing ballooned into the reality of my skull. In other words, I stopped “looking” at my embouchure from the side while trying to feel the drawing. I actually began to feel the hollow of my mouth, the width of my tongue. What helped me hold on to the feeling was my concentrating on the ring of the mouthpiece rim touching my face and lips. This feeling of “being in” my body was a strange, vertiginous experience especially at first, like the moment when first learning to balance a bicycle.

Too mystical? There are types of body-based learning in which we can participate. Anyone who has taken an Alexander Technique or Feldenkrais course knows this first hand. Although I am by no means an expert in either technique, our anatomy is often quite different from the way we think of it. For example, before taking an Alexander course, I thought of my rib-cage and spine as a ping-pong ball stuck on a stick like a candy apple. The truth is more like a ping-pong ball stuck onto the side of a stick, like a sculpture of a “P”.

The Feldenkrais Technique is a series of exercises that allow you to feel the reality of your body. Some exercises show you how to experience your pelvis in three dimensions. Others pinpoint your diaphragm. Still others articulate the range of motion of your neck, waist, and spine. With both Feldenkrais and Alexander techniques, the learning is done from the inside. Understanding begins with feeling. In the same way, the moment of clarity I experienced in the mountains taught me the truth of my embouchure in a way that no drawing could.

What has this mountaintop epiphany allowed me to do? I can feel much more accurately where I am placing my tongue. In just two months time, I could play multi-phonics much easier than before. Also, it has made me aware of how much air escapes from the left side of my mouthpiece. Most importantly, the mist has vanished between my perception of what I am doing and what is actually happening. I am certain this isn’t just a new plateau. Perhaps the previous plateaus were foothills leading up to this experience. Now begins the climb to greater heights.